"It would be so nice if something made sense for a change"
About this Quote
The subtext is sharper than the wording. If “something made sense for a change,” then the current norm is senselessness - not as a one-off joke, but as a governing condition. Carroll’s wit works because it flips the expected relationship between logic and life. Sense isn’t the baseline; it’s the rare treat. That inversion mirrors the Alice books’ larger project: exposing how “reason” often functions as social performance. The Mad Hatter, the Queen, the officious wordplay - they don’t lack structure. They have too much of it, the kind that’s internally consistent but externally insane, like bureaucratic logic or moral rules enforced without empathy.
Context matters because Carroll wrote in a Victorian world obsessed with properness, classification, and didactic children’s literature. By making “sense” feel like a luxury item, he quietly satirizes adult certainty. The line lands today because it captures modern cognitive overload: algorithmic feeds, managerial doublespeak, politics-as-theater. Carroll’s absurdity isn’t escapism; it’s a mirror held at a slightly wrong angle, where the truth looks funny until it doesn’t.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meaning of Life |
|---|---|
| Source | Later attribution: The Difference (Scott E. Page, 2008) modern compilationISBN: 9781400830282 · ID: hJRu4O8q1xwC
Evidence:
... It would be so nice if something made sense for a change. —LEWiS CARRoLL, Alice in Wonderland. SO. far we have considered the effects of diverse tool- boxes and diverse preferences in isolation. The brief summary goes as follows: diverse ... |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Carroll, Lewis. (2026, February 7). It would be so nice if something made sense for a change. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-would-be-so-nice-if-something-made-sense-for-a-173678/
Chicago Style
Carroll, Lewis. "It would be so nice if something made sense for a change." FixQuotes. February 7, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-would-be-so-nice-if-something-made-sense-for-a-173678/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"It would be so nice if something made sense for a change." FixQuotes, 7 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-would-be-so-nice-if-something-made-sense-for-a-173678/. Accessed 19 Feb. 2026.








